Facebook is changing its news feed to promote posts by family and friends over items from publishers.
Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

“Homepage. Even the word sounds old. We bring the news to your social feed.” A week ago this is what you would have found on the not-the-homepage of the millennial-focused video site Now This News. Icons for Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook guided viewers out on to the social web where the real action was. Click there now and it is a different story: social media icons have been relegated to the very bottom of the page, while stories like “Unicorn Noodles Are Now A Thing” and “Cape Town is Going to Run Out of Water” are plastered over Now This videos.

The homepage is back, and not just for those chronically old people over 40, but for every news organisation that wants to survive falling off the great Facebook cliff of 2018. Because last week Facebook announced it was changing its recipe for the news feed – the stream of posts anyone sees when they open up their account – and that the net effect would be to promote more things posted by family and friends, and fewer things produced by publishers.

For many news organisations this was a confirmation of what they had already been experiencing. Over the past three months, anecdotally some publishers tell me they have seen a steady drop off in Facebook referred traffic, some sites by more than 40%, making them wonder if this change had already taken place, while others are worried that a more precipitous drop is coming. The analytics site Parse.ly noted in December that overall Facebook traffic referrals to publishers were sharply down, to about 26% from 40% over the year, while Google’s was growing. Mark Zuckerberg, as many headline writers have noted, is changing his relationship status with publishers to “it’s complicated”.

Layoffs at “social first” news companies including BuzzFeed, Mashable, Mic and others are the hard evidence that the distributed model for news is simply not working in the way that venture capitalists and entrepreneurs thought it would. At the Tow Center for research into journalism at Columbia University where I work, we have continued to interview newsrooms and monitor publishers on Facebook. While there has been little sign of fewer stories and links being posted to Facebook by publishers, the sentiment towards the social site has soured.

No other organisation in the history of the world has had the impact Facebook has on the news ecosystem. The bland social networking site most of us use to post pictures of dogs and children and to complain at length about other people, has become a critical traffic source for many digital news organisations and the default news source for most of its users. But as we now know from the congressional hearings in October, Facebook is also the conduit for propaganda organisations such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency to try to influence American voters, and maybe even succeed.

The fiery furnace of the post-Trump US has been a hot place for Facebook’s executives. In the US, for better or worse, they are seen as the principal purveyors of fake news, a group of hyper-wealthy founders and investors who have profited from their own sabotage engine. Whatever your view on that, the withdrawal of Facebook from a close relationship with publishers is terrible news.

In a world where there a rising tide of authoritarian regimes build followings and promote themselves through social tools without the mediating layer of the bothersome press, the new gatekeepers take on a mantle of democratic responsibility. Last year when Facebook experimented with its news algorithm changes in six small markets – Guatemala, Slovakia, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Bolivia and Cambodia – news organisations saw their reach tumble by more than half. The Serbian journalist Stevan Dojcinovic wrote a stinging op-ed in the New York Times blasting Zuckerberg for treating fragile democracies as laboratories for his products.

Far more alarming has been the use of social media by the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, to build his own following and then systematically crush his opponents, often using the same tactics as the Internet Research Agency to whip up opposition to his opponents and drown out negative news. Last week as American publishers were worrying about their Facebook traffic, the Filipino “social first” news site Rappler faced closure as Duterte’s financial regulator revoked its licence for accepting overseas money. A technicality is being used to quash press freedom. Both Duterte’s support base and Rappler’s audience were built through Facebook, which has tremendous reach in the country. If the revocation of the licence holds, then Facebook will presumably continue to operate in a country that forbids overseas ownership of media companies.

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The definition of Facebook as a media company and its commitment to the news industry is inconvenient or even damaging to its presence in regimes where press freedom is threatened. Last year in Myanmar, Facebook refused to comment on reports it had marked the Rohingya activist group Arsa as a “dangerous organisation”, while Myanmar’s military and government maintain a strong official presence on the website. Facebook’s attempts to bring millions of people online in poorer countries through its “free basics” programme was one reason for the rapid uptake in Myanmar, but there, as with South Sudan and other fraught political environments, the company’s fumbled policies and half-cocked approach to publishing responsibility is potentially deadly.

Facebook’s retreat from news, and the complexities of taking responsibility for the type of content circulating on its platform, has many implications for press organisations in the US and Europe, but at least in rich, western democracies, its actions can be mitigated by other strategies. In countries such as the Philippines, Myanmar and South Sudan and emerging democracies such Bolivia and Serbia, it is not ethical to plead platform neutrality or to set up the promise of a functioning news ecosystem and then simply withdraw at a whim. Facebook knows this, and the hope has to be that its recalibration of news is not just an attempt to turn down the controversial or difficult noise, but instead become part of a fundamental rethink of how it translates its responsibilities in the future.